ABSTRACT
This chapter examines photographs taken of young migrant men who participated the Bracero Program (a US-Mexico regulated migration program that brought Mexican laborers to work on US farms from 1942 to 1964). These pictures were originally published in US magazines during the 1950s. The most famous were shot by left-leaning Leonard Nadel, and have been part of a National American History Museum (NAHM) exhibit, which has been traveling the country since the late 2000s. Rejecting the ways that the program has often been understood (not least by the NAHM itself) and, in turn, how motives and feelings have subsequently been imposed on the migrants themselves, these photos give evidence of how they construct migrant subjectivity. Unlike many other photographers, whose photos turned braceros into victims, Nadel’s images allowed migrants to “subtly assert … political subjectivities” that challenged “the labor regime that constrained them.” That is, in men’s poses, they displayed a rejection of the dictates of the stoop labor. Families remained in Mexico, while men, often north for 10–12 months, made lives in the United States. Building on Tiffolli’s and Kevin Coleman’s work, which argues that political exclusion and popular claims to citizenship were manifest in social and political mechanisms that were “inherently visual” (A Camera in the Garden of Eden, 4), this study explores how braceros engaged with Nadel to use the process of being photographed. This chapter argues that they mobilized this process to fight against visual forms of exclusion, in order to assert a collective subjectivity that configured them as modern masculine political actors.
